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Japan’s Long Nuclear Disaster Film

By Peter Wynn Kirby March 14, 2011 5:21 pmMarch 14, 2011 5:21 pm

Crisis Points gathers personal accounts of moments of turmoil around the world.

OXFORD, England — Peering at the post-tsunami devastation in Japan on miniature YouTube windows or video-streaming displays from Japanese news outlets provokes not only great empathy and concern, but an unmistakable feeling of déjà vu. As a scholar focusing on the place of nuclear energy in Japanese culture, I’ve seen more than my share of nuclear-themed monster movies from the ’50s onward, and the scenes of burning refineries, flattened cities, mobilized rescue teams and fleeing civilians recall some surreal highlights of the Japanese disaster film genre.

This B-movie fare is widely mocked, often for good reason. But the early “Godzilla” films were earnest and hard-hitting. They were stridently anti-nuclear: the monster emerged after an atomic explosion. They were also anti-war in a country coming to grips with the consequences of World War II. As the great saurian beast emerges from Tokyo Bay to lay waste to the capital in 1954’s “Gojira” (“Godzilla”), the resulting explosions, dead bodies and flood of refugees evoked dire scenes from the final days of the war, images still seared in the memories of Japanese viewers. Far from the heavily edited and jingoistic, shoot’em-up, stomp’em-down flick that moviegoers saw in the United States, Japanese audiences reportedly watched “Gojira” in somber silence, broken by periodic weeping.

Associated Press/Toho Co. Ltd.A scene from the original “Godzilla”, a film inspired by the testing of an American hydrogen bomb at Bikini Atoll.

Yet it is the film’s anti-nuclear message that seems most discordant in present-day Japan, where nearly a third of the nation’s electricity is generated by nuclear power. The film was inspired by events that were very real and very controversial. In March 1954, a massive thermonuclear weapon tested by the United States near Bikini Atoll in the Pacific, codenamed “Bravo,” detonated with about 2.5 times greater force than anticipated. The unexpectedly vast fallout from the bomb enveloped a distant Japanese tuna trawler named the Lucky Dragon No. 5 in a blizzard of radioactive ash. Crewmembers returned to their home port of Yaizu bearing blackened and blistered skin, acute radiation sickness and a cargo of irradiated tuna. Newspapers reported on the radioactive traces left by the men’s bodies as they wandered the city, as well as “atomic tuna” found in fish markets in Osaka and later at Japan’s famed Tsukiji Market in Tokyo. The exalted Emperor Hirohito himself was said to have eliminated seafood from his diet.

In a nation fixated on purity, the revulsion against this second nuclear contamination of the homeland was visceral. In late September 1954, the Lucky Dragon’s radio operator Aikichi Kuboyama died. “Gojira” appeared in cinemas the following month, breaking the record for opening-day receipts in Tokyo and becoming one of the top-grossing films of the year. During the same month, there was an upsurge in anti-nuclear petitions in response to Kuboyama’s death, and the peace movement went national.

Audiences who flocked to “Gojira” were clearly watching more than just a monster movie. The film’s opening scenes evoked the nuclear explosion in the Pacific and the damaged Japanese bodies so poignant to domestic viewers. Godzilla — relentless, vengeful, sinister — looms as an overt symbol of science run amok. The creature’s every footstep and tail-swipe lay bare the shaky foundations on which Japan’s postwar prosperity stood. The great reptilian menace onscreen — actually a man in a 200-pound lizard suit stomping through miniaturized versions of Tokyo neighborhoods — illustrated both Japan’s aversion to nuclear radiation and its frustrating impotence in a tense cold war climate.

The bizarre and suggestive menagerie of creatures that followed Godzilla onto the silver screen ranged from the intriguing to the ridiculous. Two pterodactyl-like monsters, both named Rodan, wreak havoc on Japan after being disturbed underground by Japanese mining operations. Mothra, the giant, pied moth-god of Infant Island — a fictional nuclear testing ground in the South Pacific — unleashes devastation on Japan in one film and actually gets the better of Godzilla in an epic smackdown in another. Other monsters include Gamera, a giant turtle, and the absurd Varan the Unbelievable, a large reptile resembling a flying squirrel. In all the films, Japanese populations alternately mobilize against and cower from the threats that wash up, or lumber onto, Japan’s shores.

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If there is any thread running through this sprawling bestiary of monster films, it is “the profound vulnerability of Japan,” as William Tsutsui writes in his acclaimed book “Godzilla on My Mind.” Japan, relatively powerless in the cold war arena in reality, is able in a fictional world to muster its heavily armed and impressively disciplined Self-Defense Forces to fight against, or occasionally delay or redirect, the colossal rampaging of outlandish threats.

But the films also clearly depict a human population that is, again and again, boxing above its weight class. Over time, Godzilla morphs into a defender of Japan, but dangers begin to materialize within the nation itself. For example, in addition to the lost moral compass of Japanese developers and other businessmen critiqued in several films, works like “Godzilla vs. the Smog Monster” (1971) gave voice to popular opposition against toxic pollution from Japanese industry and rapacious development that had notoriously poisoned Japanese bodies and defiled the nation’s once-famed “Green Archipelago” in a series of environmental debacles worthy of their own horror movie marathon.

If the monster-film genre is less ubiquitous than it once was, the themes it reflected are no less present today, particularly in the 24-hour blanket coverage of last week’s earthquakes and tsunami. It shows a Japan that remains visibly beset by large-scale threats that strike without warning. Japan’s emergency response teams rescue citizens stranded amid once-thriving cities I have visited in years past that are now little more than sludge and debris. Cars, trucks, trains and large ships lie swept into piles ashore or float in murky water like misshapen bath toys. Buildings implode and fires rage as if ignited by a burst of radioactive breath or a flick of a great creature’s tail.

But it also brings back into focus Japan’s awkward postwar nuclear predicament that was ambiguously illustrated by the Godzilla series. Japan now has 54 nuclear reactors, ranking third in terms of energy output behind the United States and France. Japan also has an unusually shoddy record for nuclear safety. The long string of occasionally fatal nuclear mismanagement lapses over the past few decades in a nation famed worldwide for manufacturing quality control and high-tech achievement is troubling and almost incomprehensible, to say the least. Part of this story is distinctly Japanese, as lack of transparency, insufficient inspection regimes and a sometimes paralyzing inability to make imperfect but practical decisions can leave an industry vulnerable to the sort of dangerous situations that confront the Fukushima reactors.

What is different this time, however, is that we don’t need a disaster film to bring out the nuclear contradictions of Japanese society. The tsunami was but one clear counterargument to the claim that nuclear power is a safe solution to climate change and dwindling oil supplies. As our thoughts remain focused on the plight of tens of thousands of people in harm’s way, Japan’s flawed nuclear record can help shed revealing light on nuclear power plans in other nations, including the United States, that have to succeed in the real world instead of in a far-fetched film plot.

Peter Wynn Kirby is a researcher with the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology at Oxford and a research fellow at the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences in Paris. His latest book is “Troubled Natures: Waste, Environment, Japan.“